White Lotus

by John Hersey

  I hastily asked him (giggling when I called him Lapdog) if he had seen any of our village people. Kathy Blaw?

  Lapdog’s speech in the yellows’ tongue was stilted; pidginish yet flowery. “Old Pearl,” he said, “is in number-one prosperity.”

  I asked about Nose, but I supposed I would get nothing of value from the old man; he was as pompous as ever, he spoke for effect, his eyes slid about to see whether the other slaves were listening to his words. Pearl—in “number-one prosperity” with her crabbed carpenter?

  But Lapdog surprised me. He grew angry, spat on the ground, stamped in the spittle. “Nose is going the wrong way,” he almost shouted. I waited, puzzled, looking an anxious question, I suppose. “I saw him drunk,” he said, then he raised his voice. “That boy—I remember him!” And he rapped his chest, as if to conjure up a picture of a powerful young man who had somehow been his creature.

  When our water pails were filled Gull and I trotted off with the steady jogging pace that the carrying poles required. I experienced rushes of feeling—anger at our old mayor’s portentous manner, concern over what was happening to Nose, fury at the yellows’ heavy tea water, and unfamiliar surges of elation at thoughts of the white men’s eyes on me in Yang’s courtyard, and of their harmless jokes that made me feel so gawky as the rope coiled around the squeaking drum of the well.

  Boxing the Board

  One afternoon, while Gull and I were buying food in the farmers’ market in the Outer City, near the Fox Tower, we saw that a sale of newly arrived slaves was in progress.

  I had a moment’s crazy hope that my father might be among the prisoners, but the weak wish had faded before we could even push close enough to see the faces of the whites cringing on the platform.

  Though I had been in the yellows’ capital only a few months I thought I could tell those miserable creatures in their trader’s chemises and drawers that their terrors were misplaced, that they should not be afraid of what they feared but of what they did not. I felt as if I had a wild hen in my throat that would fly out cackling if one of these trembling souls should ask me if “they” were going to eat him.

  There were no Arizonans announced among those brought straight across the ocean.

  Turning aside as the sale dragged on, we saw a crowd of both yellows and whites gathered near a market godown, and we moved toward it, and I heard shouts and ahs. Men slaves were boxing for coppers on a wide plank in an open circle. The boxers, stripped to the waist, feet bare and fists ungloved, were required to stay on the great plank, four paces long and one pace wide, which slaves at the four corners held in place on the ground. The boxer who could knock his opponent off the plank with a clean blow would win. Sometimes, when the sparring grew especially boisterous, the four plank-holders, with started veins and excited eyes, would lift the plank a span or two off the ground, and the boxers would bounce and sway on their fluttering feet.

  The yellows, who had no hand boxing of their own, and who deplored naked competitiveness but seemed enchanted by the sight of it, tossed coins, by way of applause, toward one end of the plank or the other. I felt at first a disgust that the sport we had called at home the manly art of self-defense should have been turned now to beggars’ uses.

  Gull told me that these boxing slaves were from the Drum Tower Boys, a gang of roughs and dandies among the slaves whose gathering place in whatever hours they could steal from their masters was the foot of the great structure, twenty times as high as a house, in the northern part of the Tartar City, from which an enormous drum sounded curfew over the whole city each evening.

  I clutched at my breast with a reflex gesture of grasping for my lost locket of the Guevavi martyr, for I now saw Nose among the men cheering the boxers on the plank. Was he a Drum Tower Boy, or trying to be?

  Ambitious Nose! My heart sank when I looked closely at him. His forelocks were done up in those plaits tied with eelskin; his eyes were red. He wore an old embroidered silk jacket that he must have wheedled from his master, which looked odd over short coolie trousers; his strong calves and his feet were bare. He was already some kind of dandy himself, and rough enough.

  All this game of “boxing the board,” as our men called it, was against the yellows’ laws, I well knew. Gull had spent rich hours telling me of the two levels of the yellow man’s laws—the laws for himself, and those for us. He could gather and loiter; we could not. He could game; we could not. He could vend food from a wheelbarrow; we could not. A yellow could slap a yellow’s face, but twenty days in chains for a white who tried it.

  Gull had told me of these distinctions not with resentment but simply as matters of fact; she shunned trouble.

  But Gull had carefully shown me, too, that slaveowners could not maintain an eternal vigilance; there were times when the yellow man would wink his eye and times when his stare was averted—safe moments to cavort. His double standard bred our evasion, sometimes in the open, as with this bold boxing at the market, and sometimes where and when he never guessed.

  Now a boxer fell from the plank, and another took his place. In the knot of slaves on the sidelines, Nose was aggressive, loud, and quite transformed from the eager, conscientious leader of work he had been at home. I knew that he had seen me, but he paid me no attention.

  On an impulse I broke away from Gull and ran to the clump of men and straight to Nose, and I thumped his chest with my fist and shouted in his face in English, “Box, man!”

  For a moment he looked at me with surprise and, I thought, distaste, but then with a scooping motion he swept me off my feet and began to jog around carrying me in a sitting position and chanting with bad grammar in the yellows’ language like a packman, “Big Nose got big fish! Big fish! Big Nose sell. Two copper big mackerel fish! Two copper!”

  I was mortified by the laughter I heard, and I could smell the acrid fumes of millet liquor on Nose’s breath; I felt like weeping, yet I felt like squealing and laughing, too.

  Still carrying me, Nose trotted toward the plank and jostled the two boxers from it, who gave him murderous looks, and he began to whirl on it with me in his powerful arms. I felt the jarring of his bare feet on the board under us. The slaves gathered around clapping. The yellows laughed harder than ever. I grew dizzy.

  Out of the spin Nose threw me away, and I sprawled on the ground, and as Nose leaped from the plank a square ugly man and a tall fat one took his place, to box. I stood up unsteadily and dusted myself; Nose was strutting away. He would not look at me again, and he disdained the shower of coppers tossed toward him in the dirt. Other slaves scrambled for them on their hands and knees.

  Family Life

  There came a chill on the air, and it settled in me. Gull said that the bad season had not begun; I waited in disbelief for the iron weather she described.

  By day I heard my name called through the courtyards of the house: “White Lotus! White Lotus!”—or a tiny handbell rang three times for me.

  The mistress, it seemed, could do nothing alone, not even dress herself, and I thought she must be weak, but one day she wanted to have a teak ceremonial table moved, to see how it would look at another side of a room, and, impatient at being unable to raise On Stilts or Cock with tinklings, she heaved on one end herself, with me on the other, and I saw that after all she was a plantain, having tough fibers hidden in soft little leaves. She was, however, utterly helpless in the presence of her little boy, Young Venerable, who tyrannized her. She spent hours with her favorite mocking thrush, teaching it to mimic a dog, a cat, a hawk, a rook, a crying baby, and a falsetto slave actor; and other hours combing her bug-eyed sleeve dog; and other hours with her collection of fans, opening one after another, blowing out the dust, gazing at the paintings on them. Once she showed me some fans with double folds—decorous peonies or peacocks if you opened them one way, but if you swiveled the blades the other way there were pictures of men and women who seemed to have taken leave of all sense
of propriety, in various degrees of dishevelment, wrestling in strange positions like wild street urchins; Big Madame giggled over these. Often she was playful and tender with me and called me her sweet child and fondled me in ways that made me blush ferociously, but once I entered her chamber, the Pear Blossom Rest, on an errand, thinking her in another courtyard, and found her lying on her quilts weeping; when she saw me she started up and began to scream at me, calling me a vile, mangy cat.

  The master was tall, like many of the northern yellows, and brilliant—at seventeen, in the Triennial Examinations, he had rated second of all the candidates—and in his brilliance he was cold and distant. Even his courtesies and gentlenesses were formal, and his flickering sense of humor was, whether he knew it or not, cruel. He played wailing music on a wooden flute at night, and sometimes leaned for hours over a board of a chesslike game called “surrounding pieces” with his friend the curio dealer P’an. One night, summoned by Big Madame’s three jingles to the Pear Blossom Rest, I accidentally saw Venerable Shen ready for bed—an apparition. The front part of his crown was shaved, and in back his queue was unbraided and a cascade of black hair fell nearly to his waist; his long, curved fingernails against his pale gray sleeping gown gave me gooseflesh. He was fatherly toward me, and sometimes, manifesting his kindly feelings with a gesture, he laid a hand on my arm, and I felt his claws of idleness on my skin. Hooo! I was frightened by him. Under the yellows’ unfailing courtesy and graceful motions lay a strain of implacability: Gull told me that they punished disobedient slaves by breaking their legs.

  As I made rapid progress in the master’s language, I was humiliated by his explanations to me of simple things, so over-patient and obvious. We had an Arizonan proverb, that a man ought not to try to show a child the sky.

  Very grand was Venerable Shen; among the four classes of men—scholars, farmers, workmen, and merchants—he was undoubtedly at the summit of the highest, and there seemed to be an air of elegance in his mansion, and it was not until much later that I began to see the Shens as being rather seedy. Venerable Shen’s paternal great-grandfather had been a Marquis, but in the yellows’ nobility there was a descending succession of aristocracy, each eldest son ranking lower than his father; first-order titles had passed out of the Shen family. Their money was being wasted on clinging to what was left. Six slaves were not many; a curio dealer for a bosom friend I

  Strange family life! At home in Arizona our village had seethed with active doings—chores for all, tales or games in idle hours. Here were three Shens and six slaves in a prolonged hush. Big Venerable and Big Madame and Big Young Venerable nodded, bowed, pressed their folded hands together. Some evenings the master would sit in the Peony Study and recite for his son the poems of Li Po, Tu Fu, and Po Chü-i, but the boy would fidget, and the readings often broke up with stiff lectures on etiquette.

  The moment the master took off in his green sedan chair for work in the mornings, with all four of his male slaves on the shafts, even creaking Old Bow—at that moment the etiquette seemed to trickle out of Big Young Venerable like a bladderful of urine. Sometimes in a temper this urchin, in appalling breaches of the code of submissiveness, lifted his fist and struck his mother, who rewarded him for his blows with tearful hugs. Toward us slaves, he was like a coyote pup, skulking at the edge of cover, just out of reach, ragging us with nasty noises. He would lurk in doorways and jump out at me, and I would nearly die of fright.

  The queerest sensation I had in that household was the feeling of not being there. When the three Shens were eating together at their low table, and especially when there were guests, the yellow people did not just ignore me as I served; they were simply not aware of my existence. They talked as if I were a screen panel. More than once they discussed me while I moved about the room, as if servitude and whiteness were deafness and dumbness. Had I been less unnerved, I might have heard, when the subject changed, incautious words.

  The leaves slipped off the trees, and for many days rain fell, not a hearty spattering downpour on thirsty crops but a mizzling dampness that descended like choking wet smoke. I kept up an outward cheerfulness, thanks to fat Gull’s example, but deep in my chest there lay a swamp, as if all the weeping drizzle of the yellow man’s eleventh month had drained and settled there in the form of pure liquid sorrow.

  Clapper and Rod

  On Hata Gate Street, one afternoon, Gull and I heard a handbell ringing, and then we saw Wu’s Nose, my childhood hero Gabriel now gone so fierce, tied to the tail of a donkey cart, bare to the waist, with livid wales across his back, accompanied by two yellow officers—a bell-ringer and a beater; Gull told me that this procession would stop at every corner along the street and the two men would give Nose strokes of bell clapper and bamboo rod. Neither of us wanted to see a stop, and we ran into a side alley.

  Panting, Gull said she had heard that Nose had been caught stealing a length of Shantung silk. “This is not the first time,” she said.

  “How did you hear about it?”

  “Moon Pot told me.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “He did it,” Gull said, “just to do it.” I had a queer feeling that she was praising him for his crime, but she turned on me with a stern expression and said, “If you steal, you’ll follow the cart, too.”

  That night I was so homesick I had to bite the rotten straw matting on which I lay, to keep from sobbing. I remembered the cods on the cottonwood trees at home, nutlike globes that would burst open when ripe and suspend on the wind a whole bird flock of sunny white down. And then I imagined, as clearly as if the sun itself had intruded into our dark, stale-smelling room, Gabriel’s slow, serene walk across the compound, his jeans closely encasing his moving thighs. He was coming toward me. His arms were spread wide.

  Universal Yellowness

  The mistress heaped clothing on me, and still I shook—with incredulity, fear, and chills.

  Then one day a weird yellow cloud, as tall as a desert thunderhead, came down across a spotless blue sky from the northwest, and, just as Gull had threatened that one would, a three-day Gobi Desert dust storm descended on us. The wind blew, a dry yellow fog enveloped us, and dust—my enemy in the mansion—drifted into all the rooms, like mountain snow, under sills, through door cracks, penetrating the solid roof, it seemed, until we coughed with breathing the fine stuff, and it gritted in our teeth, and it scratched at our eyeballs.

  Big Madame was upset: such storms usually came in the spring. This untimely visitation from the sky was, she said, an evil augury. A report came that at the height of the dirty blizzard the Dragon Countenance Himself had gone in secret to the Temple of Heaven to pray the evil away.

  I wanted to go to my brick bed in our slave quarters and bury my head in cloth. The whole world yellow! Yellow to me was the color of terror, cannibalism, sailors leering at weak nakedness, goat faces, little snarling Young Venerable behind a door, the master in his gray gown with his hair loosened at night. This endless swirling gaseous cloud, seeming to challenge me, the poor duster of the Shens’ mansion, to clean the whole sky, poured its dry issue on us until the ground was covered, the streets were drifted, the roofs were capped, the black bones of the trees were aged with dust.

  On certain mornings Big Madame had the habit of going to worship at the Cypress Grove Temple, in the northern sector of the Tartar City, not far from the Drum Tower; she rode there in Venerable’s chair, carried by two rather than four slaves, for she was a personage of less worldly importance than her husband, and she liked to have me run along behind, to fuss over her at starts and stops, to handle her wolfskin lap robe, to pick up her fan if she dropped it, smooth her cloak, spread her shawl. I soon understood that Big Madame Shen took me not because she needed my services but because my presence proved she had a white handmaid. Thus by her helplessness she showed her power.

  The morning the dust storm cleared she summoned me from my hopeless task of cleaning the h
ouse to dress her for the temple. She wanted to help pray off the bad luck the storm had brought. I wrapped myself in one of her castoff cloaks and presented myself at the front gate for departure. Poor Old Bow, whose joints ached, was between the front shafts of the chair, and ineffectual Bean was behind, and when we started Bow jogged along, in a ragged Manchurian fur cap with side flaps bouncing against his head like a dog’s ears, and he sang out for gangway to whatever blocked our way, and with every shout he seemed to breathe out a great puff from his brass-bowled pipe—though of course he was not smoking. I, running behind the vehicle, saw that my own breath condensed the same way; it was bitterly cold. I padded along in the universal yellowness of dust. There had never been anything like this in Arizona.

  Tingling we reached the temple. It seemed that the mistress expected us to wait an hour for her at the sedan chair. My fingertips felt numb, and my ears burned with the cold. “Sit in the footwell of the chair and bundle up in the wolfskin, my child,” she said with Confucian sweetness which did not warm me.

  Once the mistress was gone, we heard in the street the snorting and stamping, muffled in Gobi dust, of horses in the traces of carriages that had brought noble and rich worshippers, and the shaking of harness bells, and the sneezing of sedan bearers. Bow said to me, “Go to Chao-er’s. Fourth house on that lane toward the tower.” He pointed. “Other smalls will be there.”

  “And you?”

  “I have to stay with the Flying Commode,” he said. This was his name for the green-trimmed sedan chair. Big Madame defecated in a close stool at home, which it was Bow’s honor to empty after her every performance; it looked like the housing of the sedan, which Bow sarcastically thought of as her mobile toilet seat. He loathed having to carry it, yet he loved it, too, as a beautiful object that was under his charge. From a compartment in the rear under the passenger’s seat he got out some linseed oil and brass polish to touch up the arabesques of fine bamboos and the shaft ends with wrought-brass tiger heads. “Go along, girl. It’s warm in there. There’ll be pigs and sows there. Take her along to Chao-er’s, Bean.”